Micronet 800

~ the goodbye ~

Micronet 800 was closed for seven years before I plugged in my first modem, and the reason I have nothing personal here is bigger than the seven years. Turkey never had the videotex stage. Britain had Prestel while France had Minitel, a whole decade of people learning to be online through a phone line and a screen full of blocky text before the web existed. Where I was, there was no such intermediate step to miss. The line went from nothing to a browser, in 1998, in one move.

Prestel was British Telecom's videotex service, launched at the end of the seventies on the theory that the market would be businesses looking things up. It found rather fewer of those than it expected. Micronet 800 launched in March 1983 as a service running on top of it, aimed squarely at the people who had actually bought modems, which was hobbyists with a home computer under the television.

It was put together by Telemap, the videotex arm of the publisher East Midland Allied Press, working with Prism Microproducts. David Babsky was the founding editor. The number in the name was the page you typed to get there. It took two thousand subscribers in its first two months and passed four thousand by that October, which for a paid online service in 1983 was a genuine result.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The thing people signed up for was telesoftware. Programs came down the phone line and into the machine, at a moment when the normal way to get software was a cassette tape that took several minutes and often failed. Around it sat the magazine part: hardware and software reviews, plus separate online magazines written for specific machines, so a BBC Micro owner and a Spectrum owner were not reading the same pages.

There was also mail, and there were chatlines. Those turned out to matter more than the publishers had planned for. People who had bought a modem to download programs discovered that other people were on the other end of it. By January 1986 there were eighteen thousand subscribers. The peak came in the middle of 1988 at roughly twenty-five thousand, which made it one of the larger consumer online services in Britain before anyone in Britain used the word internet in a sentence about their house.

~ the decline ~

British Telecom took a majority stake in 1987 and owned the whole thing by 1989, and the problem with that is visible from the structure. Micronet was a service sitting on somebody else's network, and the somebody else now owned it. When BT raised Prestel's connect-time charges in mid-1988, the cost landed on Micronet's subscribers, who were hobbyists paying for a hobby out of their own pockets rather than businesses expensing a research tool.

The membership went down from that point and did not come back. The chatlines were suspended in June 1990 after abuse the operators could not keep on top of, which removed the part that had been holding the community together. Subscription fees went up as the subscriber count went down, which is the loop that ends these things.

~ the postmortem ~

It closed on 31 October 1991 with about ten thousand subscribers, down from twenty-five thousand three years earlier. The stated reason was that it had stopped being economical to run, which was true and also somewhat circular given who had set the charges that made it uneconomical.

What it had proved was already proved by then. Ordinary people would pay to have their computer talk to a distant one, and they would pay again to talk to each other through it. Micronet demonstrated that to a British audience in 1983 on a network designed for something else entirely, and by the time the web arrived to do the same job properly there was nobody left to say they had seen it before.

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